A variable neighborhood search for the multi depot vehicle routing problem with time windows

The aim of this paper is to propose an algorithm based on the philosophy of the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) to solve Multi Depot Vehicle Routing problems with Time Windows. The paper has two main contributions. First, from a technical point of view, it presents the first application of a VNS for this problem and several design issues of VNS algorithms are discussed. Second, from a problem oriented point of view the computational results show that the approach is competitive with an existing Tabu Search algorithm with respect to both solution quality and computation times.